5 Steps to Wake Up Early (That Actually Work)

Let me ask you a question. If someone handed you a million dollars but the only condition was that you had to wake up at 5 a.m. every day, would you suddenly become a morning person? Of course you would. So let's stop pretending that this sleeping in and not being able to wake up is about your ability to wake up. You can wake up early. You just haven't created a life that makes that necessary. That's what we're going to talk about today because it's not just about setting alarms. It's not just about discipline. It's definitely not about some morning routine that you saw on Instagram. It's about identity. It's about psychology. It's about the neurology of what's happening when you're trying to wake up. It's about how your brain is wired to either pull you out of bed or keep you in it. Today I'm going to give you five steps, not hacks, not tricks, standards that you need to set in your life. If you actually follow these, you won't just wake up earlier. You'll become the type of person who does it naturally. Number one, create a reason that's stronger than your bed. This is a truth that nobody wants to hear. I'm going to tell you as brutally honest as I possibly can. The bed isn't your problem. Your life is. Yes, your life. Because your mornings, if they were actually compelling, if your life was actually compelling, you wouldn't be struggling to get out of bed as much. Do you remember Christmas morning when you were a kid? Did you hit the snooze button when you were a kid on Christmas morning? Or did you have so much excitement that you woke up earlier than normal? You did, right? Sometimes you woke up at like four o'clock in the morning. Your parents like, go back to bed. Why did you wake up so early? Because you had something to look forward to. So if you're sleeping in, it's because sleeping in might be more exciting than your life. I don't want to be too harsh, but I want you to really let that hit. Sleeping in and doing nothing might be more exciting than your life is right now. Because your brain is always asking one question. Is this worth my energy for every single thing that you do? And if the answer is no, you'll stay asleep. It's basic neuroscience if you look at it. Your brain's wired to conserve energy unless there is a meaningful reward that you can go after. And so this is tied to your dopamine reward system. The dopamine system, it's the same system that drives your motivation and anticipation. But there was also a study that was out of Stanford that shows that dopamine isn't just released when you experience pleasure, it's also released when you anticipate something meaningful. So if your morning has no excitement, if your life has no excitement, no purpose, no pull, then your brain goes, hey, just stay in bed. It isn't worth it. And so if you want to wake up early, stop asking yourself, how do I get out of bed? And start asking yourself, what kind of life would make me want to get out of bed? And I really want this to hit home with you. I don't want you to be like, oh, well, that means I'm never going to wake up. Maybe what you should do is say, hey, I really need to do a complete recalibration of my life to make my life exciting. You weren't just born to wake up and go to a job and pay the bills and die. You were born to experience the ******* amazing life that we get in front of us. Maybe you kind of went down the wrong path for a little while. Well, find a new path and do something different. Because the people who wake up early consistently, they're not relying on discipline. They have something that they want to do. And we will be right back. They usually get up and do something that they're excited about. Something that feels fulfilling to them. Something that is just for them before they have to get up and give their energy to everybody else. And so start here. Ask yourself this question. It's a really important question. What would make me excited to get out of bed every single morning? And start building your life towards that. Okay, that's the first thing. Second thing is that as you start to wake up, just accept that it's going to suck at first. Just accept it. It's going to suck at first. This is where like 90% of people fail. Like they try to wake up early for two or three days and they're like, oh my god, I'm so tired in the morning. Of course you are. But they immediately think like, oh, this isn't working. No, it's working. It's just that your body is adjusting. There's something that's called your circadian rhythm. It's your internal body clock. And when you shift your time from 8am to 6am, your body doesn't just instantly follow. It takes time. Research shows that it could take a few days to over a week for your circadian rhythm to actually adapt. And so, yes, you're going to feel tired. That's the process. And that's where most people will sabotage themselves. They make it harder than they need to. And so I want you to understand, you've got to think to yourself, how can I make this easier, not make it harder? One of the things that I found with people that really screws up their circadian rhythm in their sleep is another way of how they really sabotage it, is caffeine later on in the day. Most people don't realize that caffeine has a six to eight hour half-life, which means that if you have coffee at 2pm, it's still in your system at 10pm. So now you're laying in bed and you're wondering why you can't fall asleep. And then you're blaming your morning. No, you probably had caffeine, or there's too much stimulation at night, or you are scrolling too much, or you have bright lights, you're getting too much blue light input into your brain, or you have constant stimulation before you go to bed and now you're trying to turn off real quick. You're doing all these things unconsciously that tell your brain to stay alert. And so of course, waking up is going to feel really, really hard because you have trouble going to sleep. And so you might not have a problem with your discipline or your laziness, you might just have a setup problem. You just need to change the And we'll dive into how to set it up for you to make it easier as well. So that's number two. Number three, lock in a consistent sleep and wake rhythm. If there's one place where you actually need to be really strict, it's here. You need to pick a wake-up time and make it non-negotiable, and it has to be the same time every single day. Yes, even on the weekends. This is where most people sabotage themselves because they go, okay, I'm going to wake up at 6am in the morning, Monday through Friday, and they start to, oh, I'm kind of getting into a rhythm. And then Saturday and Sunday, they sleep until like nine o'clock. When you sleep in on the weekends, you actually create something that's called social jet lag. And studies show that actually with inconsistent sleep schedules, it will disrupt your rhythm, like changing a time zone. And so now Monday feels like you just flew across the country and your time zones are kind of messed up, is what it feels like. So instead, what you want to do is pick a wake-up time and stick to that wake-up time every single day, and then create a system to support that wake-up time. Okay, that's the first thing. The second thing, because you're going to bookend your day, right, the second thing is that you need a hard lights-out time. Not like when I feel tired, because when I feel tired is a decision that has to be made. You don't want to have to make a decision. You want a set-in-stone time, this is when I go to bed. And then what you do is you work backwards from there, and for 30 to 60 minutes before that time, you want to wind down. You want to dim your lights, you want to turn off all your overhead lights because those mimic the sun to your eyes, and it tells your brain to stay awake. You want to reduce the stimulation, put your phone away for the night, don't look at it again, and then slow yourself down. Read a book so you can start to tire your eyes. Do some slow breath work, slow your brain down, slow your body down. You just need to slow it all down, right, because you can't go from high stimulation straight into sleep. And so your evenings create your mornings, and your mornings create your evenings. So if you want to master your mornings, you need to master your evenings. If you want to master your evenings, master your mornings. These two things work together. So you've got to have a hard wake-up time, and you've got to have a hard lights-out going to bedtime. Number four, you want to get light and movement immediately. This one's super simple, but it's one of the most powerful levers that you can do to help yourself set up your wake-up time. The first thing you do within the first 30 minutes of waking up is you want to go outside and get light in your eyes. And number two, you want to move your body. So let me tell you why this works in your brain and how it works in your brain and body. The light from the sun, specifically the sun, you want to try to get as much of that into your brain as you possibly can. Now I understand if you wake up before the sun comes up, then what I would recommend to do is turn on every light that you possibly can. Light is the primary signal that controls your circadian rhythm. And so when you wake up in the morning and light hits your eyes, once again, especially the sun. Now when I say, let me just put a caveat in there. You don't want to look at the sun. Just go outside and your eyes are just automatically going to get sunlight in them. And so when light hits your eyes, there's these specialized cells that are inside of your eyes that send signal to your brain's master clock. It's called your suprachiasmatic nucleus. And that signal tells your body, stop producing melatonin, which is what makes you go to sleep, and start increasing cortisol, which is what wakes you up. Light is what does that. So cortisol, which everybody always thinks is a bad thing because it's a stress hormone. Cortisol in the morning actually isn't bad. It's what wakes you up and makes you alert first thing in the morning. So early light exposure starts that timer in your brain and determines when you'll feel sleepy later on that night. So you have to understand, usually, from when you first get light in your eyes, you will then have about 16 hours where you set your circadian rhythm, boom, we're awake. About 16 hours later is when your brain's going to start getting tired, which is perfect for us, right? So when you get early morning light, you're not just waking yourself up, you're also programming your sleep for tonight. Super important. Like I said a few minutes ago, your mornings program your evenings, your evenings program your mornings. And so studies show how people who get morning light actually fall asleep faster when they lay in bed and have better quality sleep overall. So if you wake up and the sun is not up yet, turn on as many lights as you possibly can to get that light into your eyes. If you wake up and the sun is up, go ahead and go outside. Just being outside gets the photons from the sun into your eyes and triggers that part of your brain to actually stop the melatonin so you can wake up and trigger the cortisol and sets your circadian rhythm as well. The second thing that you want to do as a part of this is some form of movement. Movement locks you into being awake. Movement reinforces the wake-up signal that your brain's just received. When you move your body, you increase your blood flow, you raise your core temperature, and you activate your nervous system. Your body associates stillness with sleep. That makes sense. And movement with wakefulness. Even something as simple as like a five to ten minute walk or ten minutes of stretching or yoga. Those things can significantly increase your alertness and reduce your grogginess in the morning. It also helps you clear adenosine, which is the chemical that builds up and makes you feel sleepy. So this movement will actually make you feel more awake because of that as well. If you put both these two things together, light tells your brain it's morning, wake everything up. Movement tells your body we're active now. When you combine both of them, you basically flip the entire system on much faster. If you skip this, you might stay half asleep for hours. If you do this consistently and start waking up early, you'll start waking up early more naturally instead of feeling like you and your caffeine will actually work better when it's delayed 60 to 90 minutes after you wake up. Okay, so that's number four. And then number five, you want to eliminate the snooze button completely. This is a non-negotiable. It's a non-negotiable because snoozing feels harmless. I mean, there's very few things that feel nicer than when you hit the snooze button. You're like, okay, I'm going back to sleep, right? I get it. It feels harmless, but it's one of the worst things you can do for trying to set a morning routine and set your circadian rhythm. Every time you hit the snooze, you go back into a light sleep cycle, and then you rip yourself out of it again. This is actually something that's called sleep fragmentation, and it makes you feel more tired throughout the day, not less. And so you think you're helping yourself by just doing this. Oh, this doesn't hurt. I'm just going to go back to sleep for eight more minutes. You're actually hurting yourself in the way that you feel the rest of the day. And you're training your brain, hey, when the alarm goes off, we don't actually have to get up. That's dangerous. You don't want to do that. That's a terrible habit. You want to make it binary. The alarm goes off, and my ass gets out of the bed. There's no negotiation. There's no second chances. And I get it. I always say the best salespeople in the entire world is you talking to yourself the moment that the alarm goes off, because you can figure out every reason why you shouldn't do it. You have to think about this. You are a perfectly conscious human that set a 6 a.m. alarm. You knew what you were doing. Somehow, that half-asleep version of you becomes the best salesperson in the world to make you stay asleep. And so you don't even want to have snooze button be something you can even do. And so you want to put your phone across the room if you have to. You want to remove the option, because if the option exists, let's be real. We're going to take it at some point in time. And so when you're trying to set a morning routine, when you're trying to wake up, when you're trying to have some time for yourself in the morning, let's take a step back and look at it. It's not really about just waking up. It's about becoming somebody whose life pulls them out of bed. Someone who has a reason for waking up. Someone who has a process for waking up. Someone who builds structure to their day to support sleep and support wakefulness. Someone who learns to activate their brain and activate their body and remove all of their excuses. That is the biggest difference of all of this. Because the truth is, you don't need more motivation or hacks or any of that type of stuff. You need a better system, a better standard that you set for yourself. And once you have that, waking up stops being so hard and it just becomes part of who you are. So take these five things, put them into your life, make a plan, make it a standard, and see how you start waking up early.